Simple Solutions That Work!

Purpose: A common complain from a lot of non-technical mediawiki users is the lack of WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor. This basically means that user does not get to see in the final wiki page what they type in the “Edit” wiki page. There are various options to get a WYSIWYG editor for mediawiki (like MCE, TinyMCE, FCKeditor). However we will focus here on the FCKeditor which seems to be quite popular.

Note that this editor is not a standard component (yet) of the mediawiki project. So there is certain element of risk involved once you decide to integrate this. However I think it is worth the risk. You can always disable the FCKeditor with few commands later if you see lot of problems.

Step 1: Install mediawiki

Of course we are assuming here that you already have installed mediawiki on your Debian Lenny system. If you have not done it yet, then see this post on how to do it.

Step 2: Install the FCKeditor extension

As mentioned before, all additional features in mediawiki are achieved using extensions. So let’s go ahead and install the extensions.

Yes, we are checking out code directly from the SVN repository. Apparently the downloads mention on this page did not work for me. However as per the integration guide, you can checkout the SVN code directly although it is not recommended for a production system.

The above command will create a directory called “FCKeditor” like this:

# ls /var/lib/mediawiki/extensions/

Output:

CategoryTree embed_document.php FCKeditor README

Step 3: Install the actual FCKeditor

Since we have already installed the extension in Step 2, we now just need to install the real FCKeditor into our mediawiki directory so that we can start using it.

Now let’s check to see if really are getting the FCKeditor or not when we edit or wiki page. Go to a any existing wiki page and click “Edit” tab and you should be able to see the following two options (circled in red):

FCKeditor mediawiki extension

Now click on “Rich Editor” link and you should be on your way to start using the FCKeditor:

mediawiki FCKeditor

Step 6: Cannot see the FCKeditor?

If for some reasons you cannot see the editor as shown above, then try making changes to the two files mentioned here.

That’s it! You are on your way to use a WYSIWYG FCKeditor in your mediawiki.

I would really appreciate if you can report your results – Success or Failure – after following the instructions in this post.

Other Related Posts:

Kushal Koolwal works as an Operating Systems (OS) R&D Engineer at VersaLogic Corporation, an embedded systems manufacturer located in Eugene, Oregon. In his current position Mr. Koolwal works with different embedded operating systems such as Windows Embedded, Linux, VxWorks, QNX, etc. Kushal completed his bachelor’s degree in Computer Engineering in 2004 in India. He then pursued a Master’s degree in Computer Science, which he received in 2006 followed by an MBA in 2008, both from the University of Oregon. Additionally, Kushal is a database/web developer using .NET technologies and blogs about Linux solutions and businesses in general. His hobbies are traveling, playing sports, dancing, etc.

Worked like a chamr !, I used the 1.15 mediawiki version installed from the backport repositories instead, My only complaing is display the FCKEditor by default when you create or edit a page. Can you help me please? Thanks in advance for your kindness help.